Well... been running into CPU feeling not as fast as it should in some tasks - given that CPU usage seems to be pegged at a multiple of 25% or exactly 100% during such times of slowness, I kind of regret the choice of the i5-4590 in retrospect. CPU intensive games, be it in total or in single-threaded performance, seem to be causing GPU utilization issues in some cases - I'm not getting enough mileage out of my GTX 970 sometimes, especially when overclocked. Or it'd be decompression jobs taking longer than I'd like, or encodes taking longer than I'd like in practice. Sometimes I engage in rapid-fire opening of multiple browser tabs at once, and then CPU usage skyrockets, too, while I'm stuck waiting. It might be good enough, but apparently I've outgrown my needs.

I've been evaluating possible options for a CPU upgrade, and any motherboard and RAM upgrades, if required.

Right now, I'm thinking of these possibilities, stock-dependent (I'll get back to you on possible pricing information and availability, as I'm just someone living in Malaysia, which is pretty far away from the USA or pretty much almost every place TR gerbils are)

i5-4690Ki7-4790K

i5-6600Ki7-6700K

i5-7600Ki5-7700K

If I change into a *lake platform:Z170 motherboard with DDR3 slotsZ170 motherboard with DDR4 slotsZ270 motherboard with DDR4 slots

I'll be keeping the H60 around, so I'll at least do the stock frequencies, and maybe squeeze in a bit of extra hertz.And finally, probably 2x8 GB of DDR4 RAM should the upgrade specifies a DDR4 motherboard.

Thanks in advance! Everything else is basically the exact same as what I have, so it should be just a CPU swap, with possibly a tailing motherboard and RAM upgrade.

Lakes? No one seems super excited about the CPUs. It's the platform that has some advantages, and you may find them useful. Also, you may or may not be able to reuse your DDR3 in a *lake system. These systems support either DDR4 or DDR3L (lower voltage specification) but not DDR3.

The 4590 is already very close to the IPC of Kaby Lake so you're going to see minimal gains with any upgrade. I mean it's going to running at 3.5-3.7GHz in games and although Kaby offers some significant IPC benefits in other tasks (yes, encoding is one of those) the IPC improvements from Kaby are of little relevance to current game engines. You basically need to 4790K and overclock to 4.5GHz or more to see any noticeable improvement (and by that I mean improvements that are more than single-digit percentages)

I am running a 4790 at 4.2GHz right now and I think the bottleneck in some games for me is my slow old DDR3-1600.

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Lakes? No one seems super excited about the CPUs. It's the platform that has some advantages, and you may find them useful. Also, you may or may not be able to reuse your DDR3 in a *lake system. These systems support either DDR4 or DDR3L (lower voltage specification) but not DDR3.

I'd go for an i7-4790K if I could get a good deal on it, new or used.

I see. That would run to what's probably the second lowest platform cost while still maintaining full Windows 8.1 compatibility should the need arise, though I think I might be missing out on a few things that the *lakes have. It does make you wonder how close Haswell is in practice when clocked identically to, say, a 7700K.

Besides the 2x8 GB DDR3 Kingston RAM that I currently have, I also have a separate 2x4 GB set of DDR3L Corsair RAM which is usually used for diagnostic purposes. That'll probably work. Though supposedly I've heard it should be fine to run 1.5V modules...

Chrispy_ wrote:

The 4590 is already very close to the IPC of Kaby Lake so you're going to see minimal gains with any upgrade. I mean it's going to running at 3.5-3.7GHz in games and although Kaby offers some significant IPC benefits in other tasks (yes, encoding is one of those) the IPC improvements from Kaby are of little relevance to current game engines. You basically need to 4790K and overclock to 4.5GHz or more to see any noticeable improvement (and by that I mean improvements that are more than single-digit percentages)

I am running a 4790 at 4.2GHz right now and I think the bottleneck in some games for me is my slow old DDR3-1600.

Considering that the 4590 pretty much tops out at 3.7 GHz on my system without resorting to problematic BCLK overclocking - best I could get with that is burn-stable was 3959 MHz, but cold boots will take multiple tries, and at 107 MHz I'm probably right at the ragged edge of acceptable band of BCLK.

I'm thinking that, even if I do end up just getting a 4690K, I might be able to upclock enough to make it produce double-digit percentage improvements by sheer clock speed. A target OC of 4.1 GHz would be at least 10% over the current maximum speed of my 4590, and I do also wonder how much headroom the H60 might afford further up. "Mild OC" is probably only relevant for i7s, which seem to heat up more than i5s.

The i7-4790K does seem to be a tempting upgrade, given 4 extra threads...

I sorta hate to be that guy, but at the same time I don't . If you are going to go through all of the trouble of replacing a CPU, Motherboard, RAM and you actually utilize multiple threads (you mentioned decompression) then why not look into Ryzen /shrug?

I mean for you on Haswell, I'd drop a 4790k into it in a heartbeat if it's affordable and call it good, or build a Ryzen system. Unless the benefits of something like the 7700k for 1080p gaming is your thing.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

We are missing a chunk of this story that is pretty important. It is clear gaming is a priority, but we do not see a mention of gaming resolution. Bumping up to a possible 4.6ghz i7of any variety with a 970 may not improve anything, and the same can be said for Ryzen.

I am wondering if you are suffering from the 970 slow ram segment issue.. or are running higher then 1440 rez and just seeing the natural attrition of pushing that many pixels.

Cybert said: Capitlization and periods are hard for you, aren't they? I've given over $100 to techforums. I should have you banned for my money.

Agreed. I have some doubts that the i5-4590 is bottlenecking a GTX 970. In what games and with what settings?

Also... rapid fire browser tab opening slowness seems more likely to be due to internet connection than slow CPU.

I just hit "open all" on a folder of bookmarks and experienced no CPU-based slowness with a i7-4910MQ, which is surprisingly similar to the i5-4590. I still had to wait for some of the pages to fully load though - because of my internet connect (which is actully very damn fast here at work).

We are missing a chunk of this story that is pretty important. It is clear gaming is a priority, but we do not see a mention of gaming resolution. Bumping up to a possible 4.6ghz i7of any variety with a 970 may not improve anything, and the same can be said for Ryzen.

I am wondering if you are suffering from the 970 slow ram segment issue.. or are running higher then 1440 rez and just seeing the natural attrition of pushing that many pixels.

1080p, heh Think of it as something more of a general thing. Even if there might be negligible to no improvement in gaming, as long as it's not a downgrade... I'll take an upgrade for situations when I'm not gaming. For the most part I usually try to crank settings as high as possible, but still maintaining a frame rate that is also at least gets to 60 almost consistently, with v-sync turned on. Also was trying to see if I might have ways to improve smoothness in a non-GPU-limited situation.

flip-mode wrote:

Agreed. I have some doubts that the i5-4590 is bottlenecking a GTX 970. In what games and with what settings?

Also... rapid fire browser tab opening slowness seems more likely to be due to internet connection than slow CPU.

I just hit "open all" on a folder of bookmarks and experienced no CPU-based slowness with a i7-4910MQ, which is surprisingly similar to the i5-4590. I still had to wait for some of the pages to fully load though - because of my internet connect (which is actully very damn fast here at work).

Not when CPU cores are visibly loaded up in Task Manager or [insert hardware monitoring utility] at a maxed clock speed

Ryzen 7 seems to be an equally valid option when I put in some thought into it.

Last edited by Noinoi on Mon Apr 03, 2017 9:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

i7-7700 will easily do 5Ghz with water cooling, and DDR4-3200 (and higher). As some other poster mentioned though, you will be GPU limited. In reality, by changing the CPU and keeping the GPU, you would likely see some improvement in game "smoothness" due to all the other architectural improvements, since you should get better minimum frame rates and frame pacing. Not sure what you are shooting for.

i7-7700 will easily do 5Ghz with water cooling, and DDR4-3200 (and higher). As some other poster mentioned though, you will be GPU limited. In reality, by changing the CPU and keeping the GPU, you would likely see some improvement in game "smoothness" due to all the other architectural improvements, since you should get better minimum frame rates and frame pacing. Not sure what you are shooting for.

I guess in the end it kind of runs into the question of whether it is worth getting a CPU that, if nothing else, might clock a lot higher than 3.5/3.7 GHz with at least the same amount of IPC to improve speed all-around and reduce stuttering and try to lift any potential CPU bottlenecking.

I'm turning kind of general/productivity oriented than anything else, heh, given time. If nothing else, it'd be an insight on how much CPU is enough for me.

Well... been running into CPU feeling not as fast as it should in some tasks

Compared to what? Some random claims on the internet? Or just your "hope"?

Noinoi wrote:

given that CPU usage seems to be pegged at a multiple of 25% or exactly 100% during such times of slowness

In which game(s)? And which app(s)? 25% basically means the app/game in question is single threaded. We need names here to understand their performance characteristics. You may get at best 15-20% more by upgrading the CPU with a higher IPC, but is it going to be noticeable without a stopwatch?

Noinoi wrote:

I kind of regret the choice of the i5-4590 in retrospect. CPU intensive games, be it in total or in single-threaded performance, seem to be causing GPU utilization issues in some cases - I'm not getting enough mileage out of my GTX 970 sometimes, especially when overclocked.

So you are seeing high CPU% but low GPU%? I suppose running at 1080p is going to make it more CPU bound? However, I am not sure if getting 4 additional hyperthreads by jumping to an i7 will help things much. And we know IPC upgrade is also incremental.

Noinoi wrote:

Or it'd be decompression jobs taking longer than I'd like

Are you talking about * -> HDD? That is going to be I/O bound rather than CPU+RAM. Decompression should not be as CPU intensive as compression.

Noinoi wrote:

encodes taking longer than I'd like in practice.

Again, compared to what? One has to have realistic expectations. Unless you have large sums of cash burning a hole in your pocket.

Noinoi wrote:

Sometimes I engage in rapid-fire opening of multiple browser tabs at once, and then CPU usage skyrockets, too, while I'm stuck waiting. It might be good enough, but apparently I've outgrown my needs.

Your SSD (based on your sig) is not the fastest around. I am not sure if you are bound by network and I/O speeds.

Bottomline I think we need more info to understand more what you may be seeing. Just "my computer feels slow" is not good enough. Properly profiling and analyzing your issues will help make a better informed choice rather than just head into buying and finding out you are not gaining much. Unless of course if you can just spend a few K's on a whim without blinking.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Well... been running into CPU feeling not as fast as it should in some tasks

Compared to what? Some random claims on the internet? Or just your "hope"?

Noinoi wrote:

given that CPU usage seems to be pegged at a multiple of 25% or exactly 100% during such times of slowness

In which game(s)? And which app(s)? 25% basically means the app/game in question is single threaded. We need names here to understand their performance characteristics. You may get at best 15-20% more by upgrading the CPU with a higher IPC, but is it going to be noticeable without a stopwatch?

Noinoi wrote:

I kind of regret the choice of the i5-4590 in retrospect. CPU intensive games, be it in total or in single-threaded performance, seem to be causing GPU utilization issues in some cases - I'm not getting enough mileage out of my GTX 970 sometimes, especially when overclocked.

So you are seeing high CPU% but low GPU%? I suppose running at 1080p is going to make it more CPU bound? However, I am not sure if getting 4 additional hyperthreads by jumping to an i7 will help things much. And we know IPC upgrade is also incremental.

Noinoi wrote:

Or it'd be decompression jobs taking longer than I'd like

Are you talking about * -> HDD? That is going to be I/O bound rather than CPU+RAM. Decompression should not be as CPU intensive as compression.

Noinoi wrote:

encodes taking longer than I'd like in practice.

Again, compared to what? One has to have realistic expectations. Unless you have large sums of cash burning a hole in your pocket.

Noinoi wrote:

Sometimes I engage in rapid-fire opening of multiple browser tabs at once, and then CPU usage skyrockets, too, while I'm stuck waiting. It might be good enough, but apparently I've outgrown my needs.

Your SSD (based on your sig) is not the fastest around. I am not sure if you are bound by network and I/O speeds.

Bottomline I think we need more info to understand more what you may be seeing. Just "my computer feels slow" is not good enough. Properly profiling and analyzing your issues will help make a better informed choice rather than just head into buying and finding out you are not gaining much. Unless of course if you can just spend a few K's on a whim without blinking.

Hmm, I don't exactly want to burn too much money even if I can afford it.

I suppose that I forgot to mention compression in addition to decompression with 7-Zip. Coding and compiling in Visual Studio 2017 and Unity 5.5 is also a thing done here

Hmm, I think I probably should go ahead and properly test out speeds of various non-gaming tasks (gaming performance increases are secondary) to see if I'm not accidentally running into other non-CPU-related bottlenecks. I'll let you guys know tonight. Might get a better picture. Who knows, maybe I probably should just hold onto it for a bit longer... though it's all right if I do end up looking like a good candidate for an upgrade.

You own a Z97 chipset, i suggest replace your current CPU with i7 4790K, OC it to 4.7GHZ and call it a day.

I'm currently leaning very heavily towards the i7-4790K right now

I might not pull an OC as high as it, but it's a start, at least.

7-Zip appears to not be I/O-bottlenecked with archives and files that I work with, instead being heavily CPU-limited, or maybe even something else - the rates top out at 10-20 MB/s, disk active time stays under 20% for sustained periods, and CPU is either pegged at 99-100% in compression or gets stuck at 39% (weird, huh) in decompression. (Is decompression dependent on a main thread? Either way sometimes I take advantage of this by running more than one 7zip decompression job, even if it won't speed up a single job) Note that I simply used default settings for 7-Zip compression, as I invoke the context menu-based 7-Zip operations a lot.

Video encoding is another thing that I'd like to see faster speeds on. Although I don't usually transcode videos, when I do, it feels a bit awkward knowing that the i7-4700HQ laptop sometimes ends up doing it faster. Again, no storage bottlenecking. I don't really use my laptop these days, and I think it would be nice to be able to consolidate all video transcoding work to my desktop. It mostly have to do with reducing the size of gameplay videos generated by ShadowPlay functionality (as nice as it is, I can cut file sizes up to one-third of original size by processing it again with HandBrake), but I also (re)encode movies and TV shows from time to time.

I do sound like the kind of person that could use a Ryzen-ing, but the i7-4790K should still be serviceable, and I might not want to pile on the platform costs. Still, coming back, I kind of regret not going outright for the 4790K when it was still widely available, when I built the desktop. Now I guess I ended up having to pay twice - but, hey, a spare i5 for an empty B85 motherboard...